Nvidia: We Are Fully Committed to Support Linux

Nvidia Corp. has denied statement of Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux operating system, about insufficient efforts it puts into drivers for Linux. The company reminded that unlike many others it updates binary drivers for Linux the same day it does for Windows. Moreover, Nvidia is working on support for Nvidia Tegra by Linux OS.

"Supporting Linux is important to NVIDIA, and we understand that there are people who are as passionate about Linux as an open source platform as we are passionate about delivering an awesome GPU experience," a statement by Nvidia published by Phoronix web-site reads.

Nvidia claims that it understands that some people would prefer it to provide detailed documentation on all of its GPU internals, or be more active in Linux kernel community development discussions, but that would naturally disclose the company's secrets while not necessarily help it to make better drivers. Therefore, Nvidia made a decision to support Linux on its GPUs by leveraging Nvidia common code, rather than the Linux common infrastructure, which allows it to provide the "most consistent GPU experience to our customers, regardless of platform or operating system".

As a result of its decisions, Linux end users benefit from same-day support for new GPUs , OpenGL version, extension and performance parity between Nvidia Windows and Nvidia Linux support; Nvidia's Linux drivers for a wide variety of GPUs, including the latest GeForce, Quadro, and Tesla-class GPUs are updated regularly, with seven updates released so far this year for Linux alone.

Finally, Nvidia stated that it is actively working on Linux support for Nvidia Tegra ARM-based system-on-chip, which should enable a new class of Linux-based devices, including tablets, smartphones or low-power notebooks with rich multimedia feature-set and other advantages like extremely low power consumption thanks to 4+1 architecture of Tegra 3.